On Easter Sunday the Large Hadron Collider circulated beams of protons again for the first time in nearly two years. This was a major milestone on the way to recommissioning the whole project for more data at higher collision energies. However, those beams were at “injection energy” of 450 GeV (energy equivalent to particles accelerated through 450 billion Volts). The LHC itself was steering and storing them, but not adding any energy.
Last night the LHC team for the first time accelerated a beam up to 6500 GeV, which is the target for this year.
The next big step will be to store two beams at this energy, and bring them into collision with a total energy of 13000 GeV. That’s when the new physics starts!
Jon Butterworth has written a book about being involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson, Smashing Physics, available here, and in North America as “Most Wanted Particle”. Some interesting events where you might be able to hear him talk about it etc are listed here. Also, Twitter.
